Professor Darl Kolb considers the connects and disconnects of contemporary life.

Thursday, July 20, 2017

When a machine out-thinks you - Garry Kasparov's surprising optimism over Artificial Intelligence

The general commentary (and there's lots of it) on artificial (machine) intelligence is just that, 'general,' abstract, hypothetical.

We don't often hear from para-legals who lost their jobs to pattern matching algorithms, or clerks who are no longer needed with accounting software like Xero around.

Think of what it would be like to sit face-to-'face' with a machine and have it beat you at chess. That's what Garry Kasparov did. He's the Chess Grandmaster who famously faced IBM's Deep Blue computer ... and lost. Well, actually, as he points out, he actually did win earlier matches, and one match in the final attempt, but that wouldn't be news.

So, you might think Kasparov would be bitter or disparaging of the capabilities of machine intelligence. Or, quick to point out its limitations. But he's not. In fact, his TED Talk on the story of losing to AI is intelligent (of course), but also entertaining (witty), and more importantly to the conversation and debate about how humans can and should respond to the rise and rise of machine (artificial) intelligence, Kasparov's perspective is deeply inspirational about what humans can and should always do, with or without other forms of intelligence.